NO ONE's Autopathography

for Eleni, Rob and Taylor
after Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead"

Power becomes you dear endangered body skin so thin with armor
amorous Isis Osiris scattered becomes us compels you this subtlety in over-

sensitivity as the hills which once were white-mottled Romantic models as
Rukeyser would make ironic alloy call a rose a rose and us by any other aim

would recognize no other power but in degrees of this world transcendent so hell
is also MY SELF on earth because we made the factories time convolute
Vertov touted the machine age Williams never sang the Passaic for labor per se

that other Eternity power always exists the problem is what to do with it
how NOT to USE is sometimes how to direct writing from a white heat O Love

O downy picturesque particulars and pastoral spotlessness pimps your poem

“glassy moons” confound the social every rose wants to be a rose merely
every nation just a nation but can not because we fall to rise every rose begs

to be both interrupted and ongoing a paradox tautological as every pane
of glass which thisness inheres that bears witness a SOUL for every violence
committed to someone in this world of force and nothing else a gun sites the said

dialectics tread on where desires go into the Open of control my sovereign
my brain-sickness my body my head prevented the tongue as well he asks HIM

SELF “am I alive?” a ghost of sorts while she pursues her actual Bardo power at
the price of exploitation hatred at the price of force so illness transformed her.